Home again and ready to roll!

I have arrived home in Seattle after an inspiring week in Bowling Green! My other posts detail everything that I learned. Now it’s time to put it into action with Patch! I meet with my Regional Editor and Local Editors tomorrow to set up my responsibilities for the summer. I’m very excited to start doing the work I’ve been imagining for three months!

Something I haven’t talked about yet from the workshop which I definitely want to remember is the whole idea of networking and connections. Rich Holden, the director of the Dow Jones News Fund, spoke to us interns at dinner on Saturday night, and he told us to keep in touch with each other and everyone we’ve met through DJNF – it will help us get jobs. He talked about the Online News Association and scholarship opportunities. One of them is for news editing, so I will definitely look into it. Knowing what lies ahead after graduation next spring, I was glad to hear that this group can help out. It’s existed for much longer than Patch has. The skills the faculty taught us this week can apply to so many different avenues of journalism, including Patch, and it was mostly new to me. I feel like I’m still a stickler for the print, though – I LOVE InDesign, and putting pages together is fun. That’s for this fall. Meanwhile, time to write!

Enough with the nerdy stuff. I’m going to go play my cello, which I haven’t in over a week, because I have rehearsal tonight with the Bellevue Youth Symphony for the Fourth of July fireworks concert. I played with this group from seventh grade up through the end of high school, and it provided me with a strong sense of musical direction which I have maintained up to today. I’m also going to call one of my friends from Decorah whom I haven’t talked to in a long time. Maybe writing some postcards and reading about Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m still so tired from the week – I definitely did not sleep enough, especially on the last night. I slept from 5:30 pm yesterday until 6:30 this morning, so you could say my body is a little screwed up. I wouldn’t mind going back to sleep now… but I need to get to work. Until next time, here’s hoping for a great first week at Greater Seattle Patch.